Medal of Honor Recipient: “We Have This One Body We’ve Been Given”

Around the time he started thinking about running a marathon, Kyle Carpenter couldn’t put his own socks on.

He couldn’t do much in those first few months after he was blown up. When Carpenter, then a 21-year-old Marine infantryman, shielded his buddy from a grenade on a rooftop in Afghanistan on November 21, 2010, the explosion riddled his face and upper body with shrapnel. He lost his right eye, and doctors thought he might lose the use of his right arm. It took eight people to help him to the bathroom.

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Two years, the doctors told him. That’s how long it would take to get all the surgeries he’d need.

Lying on his back with his arms propped up in a hospital bed, Carpenter listened to everyone talk about how hard his recovery would be and all the things he might not be able to do anymore. The more they talked, the more motivated he became. He was absolutely going to do a bunch of cool things in his life—skydive, backpack Europe, and run a marathon, for starters.

Carpenter lost his right eye in the grenade blast.

Carpenter family

At the time, he had no idea how long a marathon was or where they were held, he just knew finishing one was a big deal. First, though, he had to accomplish the little things—sitting up, standing up, making it to the bathroom on his own steam. When he finally made it into the hallway of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, Carpenter met guys who inspired him, guys missing limbs—guys missing all their limbs—guys who smiled every day through agonizing therapy.

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So when he finally started running that fall of 2011, he pushed through the pain. He was a Marine, and that’s what Marines do, of course. But whenever stuff really started to hurt and he wanted to quit, he thought about those wounded service men and women he’d met at Walter Reed.

“I never stopped for one day keeping them in mind,” said Carpenter, who is now 26. “It’s hard for me to ever think I had it bad or can’t push. I’d think, I’m doing it for them, for the people who can’t. So many warriors won’t know what it’s like to run again.”

Those early runs started as walks with his dog, walks that got longer until one day he broke into a run. Mentally he was ready—if he could have run 50 miles at that moment, he would have. But physically, well, that’s hard to explain, except to say that he’d been in his prime before he’d gotten blown up, a solid 155, 160 pounds. Now he was more like 115.

“I wanted to run hard, but it was like I was pushing the gas pedal all the way down and I was only getting 15 percent out of my engine,” he said.

Still, it was a surreal moment. He’d gone from toting a machine gun from sunup to sundown in Afghanistan to being blown up, bedbound for five weeks, hospitalized for three months (unable to pull his own socks on for eight), and operated on 40 times. Now he was running a very slow mile as the sun was setting over his quiet hometown neighborhood in Lexington, South Carolina, the one with the strawberry patch down the road.

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So yes, he felt emotional when, two years later, he reached mile 24 of his first 26.2, the 2013 Marine Corps Marathon. Carpenter was running as part of Team Semper Fi, a nonprofit that supports ill and injured service members and their families. (The organization had helped his own family when they’d spent months “living out of a backpack” while he’d been in the hospital; in fact, one of its representatives had given him the idea of running a marathon in the first place.)

As Carpenter approached the finish, he thought about a lot of things. His country. His fellow Marines. Those who’ve served and those who never made it home. How nice it was to run in a place where people could line the streets without worrying about war. How if he just kept pushing and made it across the finish line, he might inspire people to aim for cool things in life, whatever they are.

Carpenter at the 2013 Marine Corps Marathon, his first 26.2.

MarathonFoto

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When he crossed the finish line in 4:22, he thought, I made it. “It brought me full circle,” he said. “It had been my goal for so long. All the hard times were behind me, and I just had to look ahead to all the positive things in the future. It was a really great ending point.”

Except it wasn’t the end. On June 19, 2014, President Obama presented Carpenter with the Medal of Honor for his actions in Afghanistan; he’s the youngest living recipient of the award (to date, more than 3,400 such medals have been awarded since 1861). And that October, he ran MCM with Team Semper Fi for the second time (in 5:07)—after first jumping out of an airplane and helping deliver to the starting line an American flag so large, you could see it from 20 miles away.

He was famous by then, of course, and his presence in the race meant a lot to a lot of people. He was no longer running under the radar, but he deflects any mention that he was—and is—a very big deal.

After the 2014 MCM, with General Joseph Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former Commandant of the Marine Corps.

Mike Guinto

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“This experience [of receiving the Medal of Honor] didn’t make me lose sight of where I came from in the Marine Corps,” said Carpenter, who medically retired from the Marines in 2013 and is now a junior at the University of South Carolina studying international relations. “I would take any opportunity to tell service members, ‘Thank you.’ If anything, [running the marathon] showed people that at the end of the race, I’m hurting, I’m tired, too. Just because I’m in the spotlight—I’m actually no better than anyone else. Everyone has hard days and tough times.”

Carpenter didn’t run this year’s MCM. That’s because he spent the summer checking ‘Backpack Europe’ off his life list. Another thing he didn’t realize about marathons? That they’re held all over the world. He’s thinking of running one in Rome. Or maybe Athens.“I'm definitely NOT done,” he said.

That’s because running worked for Carpenter. It was the perfect kind of “hard” to fortify his mental toughness. It got the blood flowing that helped his body heal. It gave him something to do, to aim for, and accomplish.

Along the way, he grew to love it, which was a surprise to the dedicated gym rat. And that’s what he wants other wounded warriors to know—devastating injuries might mean the end to some identities, but they can be the start of new ones as well. He wants them to know they can find a new passion.

“Running was great for me, but there are so many positive and awesome sports out there that can help you recover. We have this one body we’ve been given, so whether you run, kayak, swim, bike, on some basic level, we need to take care of our bodies,” he said. “They do a lot for us.”

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